The Apache Software Foundation

Meritocracy in Action.

Submitting ideas to the mentoring programme

All ASF projects are invited to submit their ideas for consideration in the
ASF mentoring programme. Any Apache member and experienced committers can
submit ideas via JIRA (if your project does not use JIRA you can use the Comdev Issue Tracker For GSoC Tasks. We are looking for as many interesting projects as we can come up with.

Detail

To ensure you JIRA issues are included in our list of mentored projects
please add the label "mentor" to the issue. If you want it to be included
in the Google Summer of Code lists also add the "gsoc" label. If you want
to include a number of issues in a single mentored project please create a
parent issue, label that one appropriately and add the other issues as
sub-tasks, do not label each individual sub task as they will appear as
separate tasks.

If a mentor has been identified then please assign the issue to that
mentor.

ASF Members and committers can volunteer to mentor or co-mentor proposals.
When in doubt about all this, contact code-awards@apache.org.

For more information about what it means to be a mentor and on how to write
a proposal see:

Note that interest, even by a qualified student, does not mean that any of
those project will automatically go ahead. Depending on the number of
projects; the number of people able to mentor and the timing we will
probably have to make a smaller selection.

Publicising your mentored issues

Since your mentored issues are recorded alongside your normal issues you
can create and use filters to help people find them. You can provide RSS
feeds, JSON exports and many more goodies for helping to get the message
out.

If you have any cool ideas for using this data please let us know so we can
share them with other projects (mail dev@community.apache.org)

Examples

Staying in touch

All mentors must subscribe to code-awards@apache.org, our list for
coordinating mentor activities.

Subscriptions to code-awards will only be accepted from addresses known to
belong to ASF committers, so please use your @apache.org address to
subscribe if possible, or at least an address that can be matched to your
@apache.org address via the ASF's private/committers/info or
private/committers/MailAlias.txt data.

If you are interested in the mentor programme administration please also
subscribe to dev@community.apache.org.

If you are planning on mentoring as part of the GSoC programme you also
need to register with Google, see our GSoC
page for more information.

How much effort is involved with being a mentor

Most mentors spend between 3 and 5 hours per week with their students. Most
of this time is spent encouraging them.

Within the ASF we like to think that the whole project community will help
the student just as they would with any other community member. If your
project is supportive in this way then you may be able to get away with
less time. However, as mentor you are responsible for evaluating the
student and helping them deliver on their commitments.

A note about eligibility

If your project has any restrictions on who can participate (as is the case
with Harmony for example) please be sure to clarify these with potential
students as early as possible. It causes unnecessary confusion and
dissapointment if a student is awarded a slot but is later found to be
ineligible. Don't rely on the fact that the student should have read
details on the project web site. You must discuss their eligibility before
offering to mentor them. Please also make a note in the webapp stating that
you have, as far as possible, confirmed the student is eligble to
contribute.